India's new mood

On Thursday last, in Ahemdabad, I realised one GREAT advantage of living right above a traffic signal in the city's centre: the fact that I saw, and soon joined, a protest march for a very important cause, the first of its kind I have ever witnessed or heard about in India.

Because everything that happens in the city passes by here.

I was only having my dinner at 8 pm and minding my own business, when we heard loud protests and young people shouting in unison downstairs.
Dreading it was just another Narendar Modi or BJP-related protest (basically something rightwing, and notoriously unjust), I didn't go to check. Then my grandma (I am living with my grandparents here in Ahmedabad) ran towards me saying it was a protest march against the recent gang rape in Delhi.

I abandoned my food, put on shoes without socks, and a jacket, and grabbed a camera and ran to join them. Perhaps in France it is very regular for young people to participate in strikes or watch them go by on a regular basis; this is a first time for me in INDIA.

When I got down 8 floors by running down the stairs, I realised that the whole mob had moved away. I had an idea of the general direction (near Parimal garden, where they would later go on to lay their candles). I jumped into a rickshaw. I told the driver just to "stop ahead" and when he realised I was trying to join in the mob, he took no money from me.

Another rickshaw driver on the way back congratulated and thanked me for being a part of the mob.

Once inside the mob, it was fairly easy to chant what they were chanting.

"WE WANT - JUSTICE" - the most common chant


"RAPISTS KO PHASI DO" (Hang the bloody rapists) - It often got violent.


and sometimes slightly funny how morbid it was: 

" Gutter ke gande keedon ko
Pakad ke maaron saalon ko"
(Let's kill the freaking vermin)

and it even got tender at times:

"Gudiya tum sangharsh karo
Hum tumhare saath hain"
(Little daughter, stand firm
We are with you in spirit.)

I asked some people how this had begun and on a lot of enquiry found out that it was a viral SMS that could not be traced back. One viral SMS - and about 300 college students, mostly boys, protesting the verdict of the rape case. They were demanding, quite controvertially, capital punishment for the criminals.

Since that day, the newspapers are flooded with information about rapes all over the country - and all sorts of victims and victims' families are demanding the same sort of justice that one would only think they deserve. Since then, the news channels have young, very young people chanting angrily and articulating very lucid frustration with the judicial system, political system, the religious biases, the cultural biases, and all the unchecked bullshit in the Indian culture.

It is a very positive change and I urge everyone wanting to understand India, to scrutinise the things that may have caused this semi-revolution, the means the revolution uses to reassert itself, and to critically analyse what it all finally leads to.

I have personally never felt so proud of participating in something in my country. The young here have been pretty much on the verge of losing their hope in their judiciary. I have always held that the educated people of my country have not always been the some of the worst contributors to the country's growth or well-being. And for some reason, I am hoping very much that this belief is changing.

Often enough, the solutions the crowds are professing for these crimes (such as capital punishment) are wrong, but for me, to see the anger finally expressed into some form of action is the start of a long country-wide and billion people-strong discussion. 


(For those who don't know yet, on 16th December, the news of a horrible gangrape in Delhi started making the rounds like wildfire. I'm not sure why the crowds favoured this particular case as opposed to the hundred thousand other rapes that occur in India every single day. Maybe it was because it was inside India's capital, a cosmopolitan city. Maybe it was because this time, the victim was young, highly educated, and because this awful form of valdanlism happened in Delhi, the capital - and also, reputedly, the rape capital - of India. It is of no less help that the victim is brave and continues wanting to live.
Yet, no explanation seems to make perfect sense. Maybe it's just an anger whose time has come.)

Interesting links:

How Bollywood adds to the subconscious culture of rape. (There is a lot to add to this discussion.)

An inside account from the protests all the way up in Delhi.

And this petition.

Cheers!

Life in Yelahanka Through A Socio-Cultural Lens: Project Proposal (Initial)

General Aim

The group, after making a lot of observations, decided to dwell on the fact that there is very little understanding about how to deal with the waste among residents of India. 

Since we are here to take a socio-cultural approach to the problem, our project aims to understand:

1. The psychology behind the fact that educated urban people do not carefully segregate or necessarily recycle their waste.
2. The culture behind saving and using that was ancient India, that today is only limited to the street side garbage scavengers.
3. The culture/ attitude behind not caring about public space itself – not “owning” the space or the waste and why this happens. Eg. spitting and chewing of beetlenut and pan. Here, we like to think of examples of work done by The Ugly Indian as inspiration and reference material.

Observations by the group

Since I haven’t interacted with the whole group, I’m going to let everybody else fill this in.

[please add stuff, guys]

Specific Research Questions

What is it that will make recycling/ reusing more prevalent among all brackets of society– across caste, class, age, gender, or any demographic? (ie. How not to aim only at one sort of demographic by some sort of default?) What are the already existing cultural cues we can use as quick tricks in order to get the heart of the matter and sensitise the people? [Here, we thought of the experiment that put pictures of Indian gods on all the streets where the men usually went to pee – and as a result, it was found that no one peed there any more. Again, it could be argued that this is not the way to get to the heart of the matter; it is only a short-term trick. It would perhaps not be a longer-lasting case of conscientiousness and agency. So how to create long-lasting agency and conscientiousness?]

Problem focus

Lucky for us, we do know a place where a large number of demographic boundaries merge into nothingness and people of all sorts unite.

This is the chai kadai.

Being faithful to our earlier interest of garbage dumping etc, we thought of focusing on only one kind of ubiquitous waste specific to this people-uniting space: the plastic chai cups.

• How shall we try and create awareness about the simple fact that we should not be using and throwing chai cups?
• Not only is it a hazard to the environment, a health hazard with any kind of plastic cups is that whenever plastic contains hot food, it can be cancerous. [source]

Ideas for Execution

1. In order to show people how much is being wasted, we decided to collect chai cups from the Kadai in a bin for all the Srishti working hours in a basket next to the Kadai (with some form of an intriguing sign) for 1 working day – Monday.
2. On Tuesday, our plan is to build a sculpture with the collected cups that conveys a simple message somewhere on it that tell facts about how many cups were wasted and how much potential damage it holds to the entire ecosystem (demonstrated in pictures), health hazards for humans etc. This will be displayed at as many Kadais as there are members in our group (five), and the member from the group will photograph the reactions of the people who come there, while dually gauging how correct our earlier assumption that kadais merge a lot of the demographic.
3. One more idea was, if the Kadais agree to it, is that when people bring their own cups, or prefer to use steel/ glass cups provided by the shop, they are provided by a little token by us - perhaps a sticker, or a recycled object saying "thank you for saving the environment by xyz statistic"

 I am sure that once the group meets, these ideas will either change or be totally replaced by new ones! So let's see again on Tuesday when all the paperwork with FRRO is done!